Willard Van Ormond Quine was, I believe, one of the best of the 20th century philosophers, and is someone who has greatly influenced me. Here is a TV interview by Brian Magee, from the 1970s, if I am right. They discuss the nature of philosophy. This year marks the centenary of Quine's birth.
"The Ideas of Quine" on Youtube:
Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5
Hat tip to Calculemus. The heading is a bad pun on one of Quine's most famous essays: "On What There Is".
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Milton Friedman was a magnificent economist, and I'll defer to other economists to sing his praises. But it's worth noting that, besides being an evangelical for free-markets, he was also a proponent of the rational-agent model.
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Ok, that's a slight exaggeration. It isn't built yet.
But if York space scientists and engineers have anything to say about it, it sure will be.
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I took a semester focusing on philosophy at Harvard while Quine was there. But retired and unwilling to visit our seminars, so we never met. And all this was among phiso-symps in the anthro department.
But it was kind of cool imagining that Quine might pay us a visit...
One of my philosophy professors had a Quine Story. He was in town for a symposium on the somethingth anniversary of "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" and she was assigned to ferry him around, take him to dinner and fend off the grad students fawning at his feet (one brought Quine's entire backlist for the man to sign). He had been given some little plaque or award thingy and in all the rushing about had been misplaced, and as my professor was driving him back to look for it, she ran a yellow on a left-hand turn and was almost hit by oncoming traffic...
She told us ruefully that she almost became known as The Woman Who Killed W. V. O. Quine.
Jeez, Brian Magee is the spitting image of Jim Broadbent (he plays Indy's Department Head in the "Kingdom of the Crystal Skulls").